Wilde Nights in Paradise (Wilde Security #1)

Chapter Five

“What did I ever see in him?” Libby asked the cat as she stomped back to the living room. “Men are complete assholes, you know that?”

Sam mewed in a surprisingly gentle voice for such a big guy, and she rubbed him under the chin.

“Oh, not you,” she cooed. She’d always wanted a pet and had a particular fondness for cats, but didn’t think it was fair to keep an animal when she was barely home long enough to catch a full eight hours of sleep. “You’re a sweet boy, aren’t you?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

She whirled as Jude stepped out of the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of board shorts and a towel draped over one shoulder. Holy…abs. And pecs. Flat copper nipples puckered in the air-conditioned room. A soft line of dark hair arrowed downward from his navel, pointed to the low-slung waistband of his shorts.

This could not possibly be the same man she’d dated all those years ago. He’d been in decent shape back then, but in a skinny runner kind of way—nothing like this. His extra wide shoulders narrowed into a sharp V at his hips, where a tribal swirl peeked out over the edge of his shorts. Muscle roped his chest, and a phoenix tattoo took flight on his arm, so large that the tips of its fiery wings reached toward his ear. She itched to run her fingers over it, as appreciative of the amazingly artistic design as of the bicep it decorated.

“That’s a lot of tattoos,” she said, then could have kicked herself for it. Nothing like letting him know she’d been looking.

“So what? I like getting inked.”

“I don’t mind.” When he looked at her sharply, she fumbled. “I mean, uh, I like the phoenix on your arm. When did you have it done? I thought the Marines have a strict policy about tattoos not showing under their PT gear.”

“They do.” His expression softened. “I had it done the week after I got out. I’ve spent the last month getting the ink I wanted but couldn’t have before. Next I have plans for a sleeve.”

“Well…” Her mouth went dry. She should not find the idea of a tattoo sleeve at all sexy—but she did. Oh boy, did she ever, and she couldn’t help but imagine what it’d feel like to trace all of those inked designs with her tongue…

Jude was staring at her hard, as if waiting for something.

“Oh.” She fumbled for words, realizing she’d been lost in her forbidden fantasies. “I just wanted to tell you they’re all beautiful, but that phoenix is a work of art.”

He reached out and brushed his knuckles over her cheek in a shockingly tender caress. “It reminds me of you. The colors, the spark…”

“Me?” She gave a nervous laugh and backed up a step. She hugged the cat to her chest like a shield. “That’s not me. You must have me confused with one of your other women.”

“My other women. Yeah,” he scoffed, and all hints softness in his expression disappeared. Her calculated barb had hit its mark, but she refused to feel bad for it when it was the truth.

Jude grumbled something under his breath and continued toward the sliding patio doors. He seemed to be moving more stiffly than before, his once graceful walk stilted as if he were trying not to limp.

Jeez. With everything else that had happened, she’d all but forgotten he’d hit the ground hard when he pulled her out of the way of that car. His body was probably one giant throb of pain right now, and he hadn’t said so much as “ow” in complaint.

“Are you okay?”

“Will be.”

“Do you need anything?” She didn’t want to be concerned, but couldn’t help the note of worry that crept into her voice. Especially when he turned to look at her and she caught sight of the bruises coloring his right leg a deep purple.

“Aw, Libs. Are you worrying over me?”

The cat wiggled, and she set him down. Her arms felt empty and awkward now that she didn’t have Sam to hold, and she wasn’t sure what to do with them. She finally crossed them over her chest. “You were almost hit by a car. I would be heartless not to worry a little.”

“And you’re definitely not that. If anything, you have too much heart.”

Okay, that surprised her. Was he being sarcastic? He looked pretty damn serious, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Before she could decide how to respond, he gave a smile half the wattage of his usual grin. “I just need a soak. Maybe a beer.”

“Beer? You can’t drink.”

He lifted one brow. “Watch me.”

“I mean, on the job. You can’t drink while you’re working.”

“I’m a private investigator. I can do whatever the hell I want.” When she scowled, he added more softly, “A beer or two is not going to prevent me from protecting you, and we’re perfectly safe here. Nobody except Seth, my brothers, and your father know where we are. And Seth just thinks we’re on our honeymoon.”

Her stomach twisted at a sudden, painful memory she’d long since buried. He’d promised her this. Exactly this. The house tucked away in a tropical garden, the in-ground pool, the hot tub, Key West. The morning after he asked her to marry him, he’d promised to bring her here, to his friend’s vacation house, one of his favorite places in the world, for their honeymoon. And she, foolish girl that she was, had drifted through her classes that day on a cloud of naive happiness, showing everyone her ring with its pathetic diamond, dreaming of the wedding, the honeymoon, their life together. By the time her friends took her out to celebrate that weekend, she’d had them living in wedded bliss in the suburbs with three kids, a dog, and a cat.

In fact, she’d been so blinded with love that she almost missed his betrayal entirely. Her friends tried to tell her when he walked into the club with another woman, but she brushed them off as jealous. It wasn’t until her roommate had taken her by the arm and spun her around to face the bar, that she finally understood. Jude sat on one of the stools with a stunning brunette standing between his legs, her long body pressed as close to him as she could get with clothes on, and her tongue down his throat. Even then, with the evidence of his cheating staring Libby in the face, she hadn’t wanted to believe it. She thought maybe this was some kind of misunderstanding or a case of mistaken identity like in the movies. But Jude lifted his head and looked right at her, his pale blue eyes cold. Heartless. Like he hadn’t proposed to her only two days before.

Without a single word, she strode up to him and dropped the ring into his drink. Then she turned away, and as tears smeared her mascara and blurred her vision, she’d heard the brunette ask him who she was. His response killed every last tender feeling she might have harbored for him.

Nobody.

She was nobody to him.

He never tried to call, never offered any kind of excuse, lame or otherwise. He just vanished. She tortured herself for years, wondering what she’d done in the two days between his proposal and his betrayal to make him change his mind.

Libby shoved that all out of her thoughts. It didn’t matter. It was like a previous conviction that couldn’t be brought in front of the jury and had no bearing on their current situation.

Jude was still talking, oblivious to her trip down ugly memory lane, and she forced herself to focus on what he was saying.

“…my brothers are keeping an eye out for K-Bar, and Seth has this place wired up better than the CIA.” He exhaled a hard breath and shook his head. “Guess some good came out of his paranoid psychosis after all.”

And there was the perfect segue to ask the question that had been bothering her since Seth left. Plus, it had the added benefit of taking her mind off the past. The way he’d acted with Seth flew in the face of everything she thought she’d known about Jude Wilde.

“What did he mean when he said he doesn’t blame you?”

“You know what? A beer or six sounds like an excellent idea.” He detoured to the fridge and grabbed a six-pack out of the door. “Let’s indulge. This is our honeymoon, babe.”

“Don’t call me babe.” But she took one of the bottles he handed her and trailed him out to the patio. Watched as he pulled the cover off the hot tub and started the jets. He settled into the steaming water with a sigh, letting his head drop back against the padded side, and said nothing more for several long moments.

When she didn’t go back inside, he lifted his head. “You gonna stand there all night or join me?”

God, she was tempted. It looked like a slice of heaven, but… No. Way too intimate.

She settled for sitting down on the edge and dipping her feet into the water. “So you’re not going to answer me?”

“About what?” he mumbled, the question slurred like he was already half-asleep.

“About what Seth said.”

He studied her, then took a long pull from his beer. “You’re not gonna drop it, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, shit. You can’t think any worse of me.” He drained the beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his strong neck with each swallow. When he finished, he snagged another bottle.

“Slow down,” she said. Considering they hadn’t eaten dinner, she’d be scraping him off the bottom of the tub before long if he kept this up.

He ignored her, twisted off the cap, and tapped the neck against her bottle. “To friends.”

“Okay.” That was something she could definitely drink to. “Friends.”

As she raised her beer to her lips, he added, “May they always cover your ass, even if it nearly gets them killed.”

Oh, yes, there was a story here. She set her drink down without taking a sip. “What happened?”

Jude twirled the neck of his bottle between two fingers. “I was supposed to go on that mission, the one that… Fuck.”

Libby waited, her instincts telling her that if she opened her mouth now, he’d use the opportunity to change the subject. Worse, he’d clam up, and she’d never find out what happened between him and Seth. For reasons she couldn’t begin to name, it was important to hear the story.

“Seth wasn’t supposed to go on the mission,” Jude said softly after a long moment. “But he covered for me. I woke up that morning sick as hell. He was afraid I’d go out there and get myself or my men killed, so he took my place. Told our captain I had the flu.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Turns out, he wasn’t lying. The nasty food, shitty living conditions, and lack of sleep all combined into one helluva bug that kept me bedridden for a week. I ended up in the hospital in Germany with pneumonia, and I didn’t find out for another week that they’d been ambushed. All but three of them died in the attack. Of those three, Seth’s the only one who survived captivity.”

Oh God. She couldn’t begin to imagine… No, she decided. She didn’t want to imagine what it must have been like for Seth. She couldn’t help him, but Jude was another matter entirely. Sitting there in the tub, reliving the nightmare of discovering his best friend was a prisoner of war, he looked so worn down, nothing like his usual jovial self.

Unable to think of anything else to do to offer comfort, Libby reached out with her foot and touched her toes to his calf. He glanced up in surprise at the contact, and she made herself hold his gaze. “I can see why Seth doesn’t blame you.”

Jude snorted. “He should.”

“Why? Did you mastermind the ambush?”

“Hell no.”

“Did you purposefully get sick so you couldn’t go on the mission?”

“Of course not.”

“There you go. No court in the country would find you accountable for what happened.”

He said nothing, just continued twirling the bottle.

“Do you blame yourself?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” he muttered.

“I’m a lawyer. It’s a requirement.” She scooted around the edge of the tub so that she was sitting beside him and waited until he lifted his gaze to hers. “Jude, do you blame yourself?”

“Nah.” He took another long pull from his beer. “I don’t play that blame game. It happened. It sucked for everyone involved, especially for Seth. Nothing I can do to change it.”

Uh-huh. That was a big, fat lie. “So you drink away your issues.”

“No. I just don’t look back. It’s a philosophy that hasn’t done me wrong yet.”

Now that lie she would call him on. “You’re full of shit.”

He said nothing more. Libby sighed and drank from her own bottle.

“So how is this bodyguard thing going to work?” she finally asked. “Are there rules or something?”

“We need to keep a low profile,” he said, sounding more like his usual self. Back in his comfort zone. “I’ll be in touch with my brothers, but otherwise, we’ll have a strict no-contact policy. No phones, no Internet, no contact with anyone you know in D.C. Anyone around here asks, we’re James and Liza Wilson.”

“Who are they?”

“Us. Greer pulled some strings, got us some fake IDs. We’re honeymooners from Virginia, but I don’t plan on giving anyone the opportunity to ask about us. We’re going to stay in this house unless we absolutely have to leave for some reason, like for groceries. No beach trips.”

“Stuck in Key West and I can’t even go to the beach.” She laughed humorlessly. “Figures.”

“Hey, I’m no happier about it than you. I’d give anything to be out there right now dancing my legs off to that music.”

Libby tilted her head and listened. She hadn’t noticed until he mentioned it, but now the distant, joyful beat made her want to dance herself. Her instinctive response was to apologize for his having to stay here with her, and that pissed her off.

“I don’t need you.” She waved a hand. “Go dance, have fun. I’m sure there are plenty of women out there, too. Easy pickings.”

Jude sat up straighter and set his beer on the edge of the tub. “You know, I don’t particularly like this opinion you have of my sex life.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Libby, you can’t keep holding the past against me or this is going to be a very long mission. I was young—”

“And stupid.” She rolled her eyes, finished off her beer. “Save it. I was naive. So very naive to think a player like you would fall in love with a nerd like me.”

“Goddammit, I did—” Jude half rose out of the tub, but caught himself and bit off whatever he’d been about to say. He sank back into his seat, swiped up his beer bottle, and drank the remaining contents on one breath. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

“Doubt it.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked with a hint of defeat in his tone. “That I didn’t sleep with anyone after you? That I didn’t date? Of course I did. It’s been eight years, and I’m not a monk. There were men after me, weren’t there?”

She didn’t want to tell him the truth and took a sip of her beer to stall.

His brows drew together, a crease forming between them. “Weren’t there?”

Her throat tightened. “One night with a guy in law school.”

Silence fell between them, filled with the hum of the hot tub’s jets.

God, she shouldn’t have told him that. Worse, she shouldn’t be jealous of all his nameless, faceless lovers. But as ridiculous and illogical as it was, it hurt to think that he had enjoyed sex with other women when her one attempt after him had been a miserable failure. Dammit, she wanted the pleasure he’d so freely given other women.

Just once.

“You owe me.” The declaration popped out without her consent, her mouth acting before her brain fully processed the thought. But what the hell? Despite the impulsiveness of the idea, it was a good one. She could work out all of her sexual frustration tonight, on her terms, before it bubbled over into something uncontrollable and dangerous. Maybe he wouldn’t even be as good as she remembered, and then she could erase the past eight years and start fresh.

“You. Owe. Me,” she repeated, enunciating each word.

His brows lifted. “I do?”

“Oh, yeah. You may not have been celibate, buddy, but I damn near was. It was supposed to have been just the two of us for the rest of our lives, but you took that from me. You robbed me of eight years of my sexual life. So you owe me one night.”

His eyelids dropped to half-mast, and he looked at her through his lashes. “Just one?”

“Yes. That’s all. I’m tired of pretending I’m not still attracted to you. Since we have to live together for the foreseeable future, I want to get it out of the way now.”

“So logical.” A slow grin spread across his face. “But, Libs, you’ve been doing it all wrong if you think one night will satisfy either of us.”

“I haven’t been doing it at all, and that’s the problem.” She held up a finger. “One night, Jude. Take it or leave it.”

He stood, and steam rose off his chest. Weighed down by the water, his shorts hung so low on his hips that she could see the tip of his very erect penis. “Oh, I’m definitely taking it.”